The HumpMan's Homepage

Welcome to the HumpMan's Homepage. Currently, the focus of this page is to provide a means of distributing the text (and hopefully the graphics, too) of the English "penny dreadful" gothic novel, Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood which was first published in the 1840's.

New! *** Other Sources for Varney Texts *** New!

It has recently come to my attention that there are now other sources for Varney the Vampyre on the Internet. One of these is The Gutenberg Project which now has the at least some of the text and illustrations (from the 1970 Arno edition, I believe) as text number 14833.

Another source is the Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia (UVA). It appears that they are basing their version on my text files, although it doesn't look like they are including the illustrations. It is, perhaps, fitting that they used my files, since I transcribed much of the text from the 3 volume set (again the 1970 Arno edition) that is in the University of Virginia library!

(Note: UVA is indexing their version using Prest as the author, since this is what was thought to be the case when the Arno edition was published. The later reprinting by Dover indicated that the author was much more likely to be Rymer.)

Yet another source for the text of Varney is at Google. Here's a link to the text of Varney the Vampire: Varney at Google.

And yet another source for the text of Varney, but in audio form is at Librivox.org. Here's a link to their audio files of Varney the Vampire: Varney at Librivox.

All text chapters (237 total) and text archives are available.

Please consider contributing your own comments, or a full introduction if you want, to the Introduction page! If you are interested in contributing your own thoughts, critical review or scholarly research, please e-mail me.

For the sake of simplicity and expediency, these Web pages have been done with minimal HTML. The text files have been collected in plain ASCII text format with no HTML enhancements. Any browser should be able to acquire the text of each chapter by saving that chapter's page as a plain text file.

Provisions have also been made for downloading sets of chapters in compressed archive form. The entire Varney saga, some 237 chapters, has been broken into archives of 20 chapters each. Using HTTP file transfer, you can download self-extracting LHA compressed archive files (MS-DOS only). ZIP archives are also available, for those that prefer them. Those that use a platform other than MS-DOS should be able to use the ZIP archive files.